From Battling Poverty To Becoming One Of India's First Crypto Billionaire - The Story Of Jaynti Kanani

From facing poverty as a factory worker's son, doing a Rs 6,000 monthly salary job, co-founding a crypto firm, getting Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban as an investor in it, to becoming one of India's first crypto billionaires, the story of Jaynti Kanani is truly an inspiring one.

From Battling Poverty To Becoming A Crypto Billionaire

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As the son of a diamond factory worker who lived in a small house on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, he often struggled to pay his school fees. His ambitions then were to land a decent, salaried job that would help pay off his father¡¯s debt.

In his school days, his family didn¡¯t have money to pay school fees. But luckily he passed 10th and 12th and then joined a college nearby called Dharamsinh Desai University in Nadiad and did his engineering there.

"My goal was to have a decent job and to pay the debt my father took for our education and my sister¡¯s marriage. So I joined Persistent Systems in Pune. My salary was Rs 6,000 per month. My father also retired due to vision problems and couldn¡¯t see the shape of diamonds then. So I had to look for my next job and luckily I got a full-time job."

"I used to work on multiple side projects. I joined a startup of Sumit Maniyar then who later started Rupeek. Then I joined Housing.com and then started Matic. At some point in time, I was deep in debt because I also took loans to get married. I never thought I would start a billion-dollar company", he had said in an interview with Money Control.

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Surely, his destiny had much better plans than he thought. When asked how he tells his family about his venture, Kanani said, "To be honest, my family, they don¡¯t understand Polygon. I am not sure if my parents understand what I do, to be honest, so there¡¯s no way for me to make them understand. For people who can understand, I can just say I¡¯m building, scaling, the next future of infrastructure for banking and everything."

Getting Shark Tank Judge Mark Cuban As An Investor

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? @mcuban is one of the most prolific and insightful investors with investments in top startups and he is also one of the Sharks on @ABCSharkTank.

?? We're proud to share that @0xPolygon is now part of the Mark Cuban company portfolio!

? Visit: https://t.co/RZg0oIomFS

¡ª Polygon (Labs) (@0xPolygonLabs) May 25, 2021

Before Shark Tank judge and billionaire Mark Cuban was an investor in Jaynti's Matic, he was a user of it. He had reportedly been using Poly applications very frequently.

That also triggered the investment, to be honest, he said. " So we thought, let¡¯s ask him if he¡¯s interested or not, and then we reached out to him and he was more than happy to invest in Polygon. I think we are the first crypto projects out of India he has invested in. And with Mark on board, it¡¯s a great moment for the Indian ecosystem as well."

More About His Crypto Firm's Journey

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Crypto firm Polygon was founded in 2017 when it was called Matic before being rebranded with its current name. It was founded by four Mumbai-based software engineers: Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. It makes the digital coin Ethereum more accessible and can be used for developing other decentralised apps (DApps) like decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). It was created to solve the problem of high fees and slow transactions on Ethereum, the world¡¯s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation.

The company's big highlight came when it raised a 'sizeable investment' from billionaire Mark Cuban in 2021. As per Business Today, a year later, the company onboarded YouTube¡¯s head of gaming, Ryan Wyatt, to lead Polygon Studios.

Then in February 2022, the company raised $450 million from more than 40 venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital, and others.

A year later, in February this year, after laying off around 100 employees, Polygon clarified: "The treasury remains healthy, with a balance of more than $250 million and more than 1.9 billion MATIC, and we have crystallized our strategy for the next several years to help drive mass adoption of web3 by scaling Ethereum."

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